USB Printer 1

[tlindsay42]

I am currently doing a rollout of 160 laptops that will be sent with HP DeskJet 6540 USB Printers. The laptop users have User level permissions and I am on an NT4 domain. I have an installation shared on the standard image to keep the driver stored locally, but if I connect a different printer than the one on the image, the laptop tries to reinstall the printer and won't use the installation in the list. I don't want to unbox 160 printers and install each one with the corresponding laptop and admin and power user level permissions is out of the question, so is there a way to give Users permission to install only USB Printers?

Thanks,
-Big T

 

[TamedTech]

hmmm ... so let me get this right ... your trying to confirure a 160 laptops but your not runnind a domain setup? For all the time its going to take you might aswell buy a server 2003 and config it as a DC and push all of the user profiles and printers out through that.

 

[tlindsay42]

Unfortunately that is not an option at this time. Anybody else?

Thanks,
-Big T

 

[DTracy]

Big T-

This may work:

On your domain server give each user admin rights on an individual basis. When the printer update is complete set the user back to user. I may have oversimplified this a bit but it works on our domain for the same purpose--installing printers and other personal items.

Regards,
David Tracy

 

[MichaelDell]

I don't know of any method right off hand to grant only that right, but if the user is going to be connecting to the domain when they logon with the first time their domain account, you could place the Domain Users group in the local Administrators group. Then take the vbscript below and place it somewhere such as the %TEMP% folder and point to it from HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce


'*** Pulls the Domain Users group from the local admin group
On Error Resume Next

Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strCompname = objShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings ( "%COMPUTERNAME%" )
strDom = "YOUR DOMAIN NAME"
Set objGrp = GetObject ( "WinNT://" & strCompname & "/Administrators,group" )
objGrp.Remove ( "WinNT://" & StrDom & "/Domain Users,group" )


Include a note that they must hook up the printer the first time they log in, test it, and logoff or reboot once they verified it works. They will have admin rights, but only for that one session since the global domain users group will have been removed as soon as they logged in.

There is the slight risk of a savy end user noticing that he has admin rights before logging off and adding his account to the local admin group, but that is slim. There is also the risk that they ignore the instructions and log off before installing the printer. Overall, you will take care of the majority.

I have used this method a few times to complete software updates such as MDAC & JET SPs that are pushed out via Zenworks and require admin rights to finish up the install doing things such as registering .dlls after the reboot.